MOOC News Roundup — Tackling Job Openings and Unemployment

The hip thing this week is to identify your favorite data points from Mary Meeker’s (of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers VC firm) annual Internet Trends slide deck. You probably already knew that MOOCs are growing (slides 99-101). And there’s a ton more in there about online education generally. But a couple pieces of information stood out to me as interesting for anyone tracking the progress of MOOCs. Slide 88 points out that the projected annual deficit in graduates vs. jobs openings in computer science is 71,000 per year. Slide 90 says that a selection of five large tech companies collectively have 10,000 job openings right now in the U.S. Anyone still wondering why Georgia Tech wants to scale its master’s in computer science for 10,000 students over three years?

While we’re on the subject of Stanford MOOCs, some of their classes tend to fall through the cracks. You’ll find courses from individual Stanford professors on Coursera and edX, but there are are also courses on Coursebuilder, Venture Lab and Class2Go. They’ve got all these collected under one portal at Stanford Online. The next one up is Design Thinking Action Lab through the Epicenter engineering project.

If the Pope or any of the Cardinals of Vatican City are reading this, you can now build and participate in MOOCs in Latin. Eliadamy is a free learning management system based in Finland that is differentiating itself by supporting lots of localization and now includes supports for teachers working in 14 languages. They’re planning on 40 languages by the end of the year.

Is there any big news we’re missing? Let us know in the comments, or be in touch through the contact form. In the meantime, to get this news roundup in your email box, be sure to sign up for our newsletter.

My content marketing services firm provides all-in-one external staff solutions for companies looking to grow their business through thought leadership. I started MOOC News & Reviews in 2013 out of a fascination with the economic, demographic and technological forces impacting edtech, online education and higher education, and I wanted to provide a forum for serious discussion of this new phenomenon. I love building communities of writers engaging in lively critical dialogue about emerging issues.